From a Spiral Notebook: Lake Smells

Hi all,

First of all, I have two announcements:

• I’m facilitating a six-week writing workshop on zoom with Naramata Centre. It’s on Tuesdays from 6 to 8 pm Pacific time, starting September 4. If you’re interested, check it out here. I’d love to write with you!

• The Sidney Drop-in is back, now called Writers’ Drop-in with Kelsey Andrews and in partnership with the Sidney/North Saanich Library. I’m really excited to hopefully see everyone again. The next dates are Saturdays Sept. 7, Oct. 5, Nov. 7, and Dec. 7, 2024, from 2 to 4 pm. More information here.

  

  The Lake from many summers ago. One of my favourite things about The Lake is it still looks almost exactly the same. Things at The Lake change very slowly, if they change at all.

I have been furiously cooking things to freeze and packing for the last couple weeks (with a lot of procrastinating thrown in) for the two-week stay our family does every year in the rented cabin at The Lake. We’re leaving tomorrow, and I really should be packing, but instead I’m at my desk, thinking about smells and outhouses.

The Lake smells like sunshine, like summer and lazy afternoons and campfires and burnt marshmallows and outhouses. That last especially near the end of the summer, when the people who rent the cabins have filled them up, before the pumper trucks come in to empty them in the fall.

Each outhouse has the number of the cabin on it, and a little path running to it in the woods from the cabin. Each outhouse has a little air freshener bottle that does nothing but add an artificial too-sweet layer to the smell when you sit down. Each outhouse has spiders, and the fear of spiders, and the fear of falling into the deep hole when you’re young or dropping in the flashlight or a wedding ring when you’re old.

The outhouse is a place to escape the family for a few minutes, all of us in two rooms and a pullout couch, siblings like caterpillars in their too-hot sleeping bags. It is a place to walk to, watching toads in the flashlight beam, tripping on roots, getting wet in the rain. It is the reason we know the stars so well, all of us, when we wait for each other.

The smells will be different this year, as they have been the last few. No campfires. Climate change has stolen campfires from us. We humans have stolen campfires from ourselves, rather, by way of causing wildfire season, and so we can have no campfires anymore. I miss them, and also every time I miss them I think of wildfires and climate grief creeps up to devour me.

FROM THE SPIRAL NOTEBOOK

Speaking of wildfire season, I thought I’d return to a poem I shared back in the summer of 2021. It feels appropriate for the sadness I’ve written myself into just now.

Air Quality Advisory

The moon is more beautiful
when it is full.
Though there is beauty, too,
in a hidden face, in the profile,
we mark our calendars for the full.

The moon is more beautiful
than usual, pinker than a peach,
that part of a peach’s flesh
closest to the stone when you cut
a slice, that secret colour
growing outwards.

The moon is more beautiful
because California is burning.

NOTES

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• And thanks, as always, for reading.

Yours,
Kelsey Andrews